Abstract:
Our always-on world of PCs, tablets, and smartphones has come about because of one remarkable trend: the relentless miniaturization of the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOSFET. This device, which is the building block of most integrated circuits, has shrunk a thousandfold over the past half century, from the tens-of-micrometers scale in the 1960s to tens of nanometers today. And as the MOSFET has become tinier, generation after generation, the chips based on it have become much faster and less power hungry than their predecessors.